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Seattle Approves $15 Per Hour Minimum Wage
An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle City Council announced on Monday that it has unanimously approved a $15 per hour minimum wage mandate. The new rate will go into effect starting April 1, 2015 in a tiered, gradual manner that depends on employer size. In the first year of implementation, hourly minimum wage will be raised to either $10 or $11 according to the employer size category. By 2021, hourly minimum wage across the board should be at or above $15. Seattle is the first city to implement a living wage for its lowest earners."
$15 per hour is barely a livable wage currently; there's no way it will be in 2021.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
$15 will be the new $7.50
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
I hope everyone on Seattle loves to interact with machines rather than people. That is what you will experience at McFastFoods, Starcoffee, and any other unskilled labored job.
Unfortunately this will hit teenagers the most. Contrary to what the supports of the home cherry pick, those who earn minimum wage have the least amount of experience. In other words, young people. And while the law will make some exception for teenager salaries, with the addition of all the enhanced automation, you'll have a city with a high population of unemployed teens which causes a different set of issues.
I hope I'm wrong and this turns out to be a good thing. It's nice to see a community try something different so everyone can learn from the experience.
In Sweden we have no minimum wage. We're said to be one of the richest countries in the world, but there is a dark underground that very few speak about, and that is about all those people who work for LESS than the US call "minimum wage". It may sound like a joke to you (especially if you read the numbers), but I can assure you - it is not. When I was new to Sweden, I had to work for LESS than minimum wage as a substitute teacher in some small city. Substitute teachers have no rights, receive only what they can negotiate (which is usually very little, and we compete with foreigners and FAS3...gov. unemployed activity candidates) for the scraps.
The same thing with burger flippers, and now also train-personnel (they're currently on STRIKE in Sweden right now, for the rights to work full-time instead of being paid by the hour and shared amongst many desperate job seekers).
This seems to be the net outcome of the society we've chosen today, to let the few have 80% of our assets, and the rest just work as slaves for the 10-20% rich elite. I must stress that I am not a socialist or communist by a long shot, but there is something wrong with a society that can't pay their workers a proper wage.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
They've just promised that some other group of politicians will raise it years from now?
This seems to be the way so many new laws work: they're delayed until after the next election, so today's politicos can take the praise for passing the law, and the new bunch will be the ones in power when the problems become apparent.
Pull your head outta your ass for 2 sec and understand the problem, the new pay for employee's gets pasted on to customers a lot of them are ones making that 15$ an hour which makes their wage increase less helpful, plus if company wants to minimize the increase in their prices they have 2 options, stop hiring or fire some people. doing massive pay hikes ends up doing as much or more harm then it help's and turns in nothing more the something politicians use in their coming campaign
Still further there is the even more ignorant people that believe that not only should there be a minimum, but that it should be a "living wage" -- because all work that must be done must also be worth enough to afford a nice cozy life.
Whoa, back the horse up. A living wage is not about a "nice cozy life". It is about not having to choose between eating and paying the rent. Believe it or not, there are some people in this country that have to make that decision. Why should anyone have to work 2-3 jobs just to survive when corporate profits are at an all time high?
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
this is what makes me angry about people bitching about minimum wage increases. there are *so* many countries with much higher minimum wages that you could quite easily look at to see the result of said changes.
here's a hint, the worse off are much less so.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
You're uninformed and have a vastly over-sized opinion of your own knowledge. Plenty of very credible economists support the idea of a minimum wage, in fact many support a minimum wage nearly 50% higher than the current US minimum wage source here
You know when you see 'stupid' people saying they don't see why doctors, lawyers, scientists, programmers etc get paid so much because they don't understand what they do and thus think it must be easy? That's like you commenting on what 'serious' economists think when you clearly haven't got a fucking clue.
What we really need is a maximum wage; a maximum amount of annual income -- from any source -- that a person can make. This maximum amount should be tied to the median income or some such so that if the rich and powerful want to increase their earning limit, they have to do things that will benefit all of society instead of hurting all of society.
Too much of the economy's lifeblood (i.e. money) is sequestered in the bank accounts of the ultra-wealthy, which a) stalls the economy, and b) gives a disproportionate amount of socio-political power to those individuals. The current vast difference in wealth is as damaging to the human race as things like racism, homophobia, nationalism, etc. (if not more so), and people really need to realize this.
There is an entire class of people that most of society never sees, but which has a profound impact on their lives...and our current economic setup promotes sociopaths and psychopaths into this class. These people have the economic power and the self-centered focus to literally destroy the planet. This situation has to be rectified.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Imagine the minimum wage is $100/hour. There's a massive number of job which simply do not produce that much wealth per hour - they cannot exist, because to offer that job to someone is to lose money. All those jobs disappear.
Setting aside the stupidity of $100/hr minimum wage... (I mean, why not $1,000,000/hr right?)
The jobs that people do for under $15/hr still need to be done. Not every job produces wealth. Nobody gets rich by having clean floors, or mowed lawns, or bagged groceries. However, these are examples of tasks that arguable have to be done by someone, and the cost of not having them done can, at least in some cases, be argued to be greater than $15/hr.
The same applies to jobs that "do not produce that much wealth" - they still need to be done. Either you pay someone $15/hr to flip burgers, or you stop selling burgers and go out of business. Don't want to go out of business? Pay the $15/hr and increase your prices by the ten cents or whatever it averages out to be. What a goddamn stupid argument you're making.
I'd rather pay an extra buck for a trip to the local fast food place than have my tax dollars end up subsidizing the employees through food stamps and housing because they're barely paid enough to afford the same food they cook all day.
=Smidge=
OK so some businesses will not be able to either give up some profit or raise prices to accommodate the higher wages... they go belly up. But then whatever services they provided will be unavailable & someone will jump in & fill that gap. It's hard to believe the claims of job losses tied to the minimum wage.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Keep in mind that a family would qualify for SNAP and rent support also.
Translation: the employer can only get away with paying only $7.50 because the government makes up the difference between that and a realistic wage. Benefits without minimum living wage == state subsidy of industry. Still, don't worry, if you look around enough you'll be able to find someone faking disability to parade in front of the media, and prevent people asking awkward questions about how much taxpayers money goes to allowing working people to survive on unliveable wages.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
$15 per hour is barely a livable wage currently; there's no way it will be in 2021.
$15/hour is approximately $30,000 per year. If you can't figure out how to live on $30,000 per year then you are utterly clueless and/or spoiled. No it won't be a posh lifestyle but it's certainly enough to get by and it will be in 6.5 years too baring economic catastrophe.
What business hires employees they don't need? If you lay people off because the minimum wage is raised, who takes over the work those people did?
Here's a contrived example to illustrate the point.
Let's say that Acme Inc has a low-skill job that can be performed equally well by either by a human or by a machine. Should Acme hire a worker to perform this job, or purchase a machine?
Answer: it depends on which costs more. Let's say that over the expected lifetime of the machine, the costs to operate it (purchase, maintenance, electricity, etc.) nets out to $15 per hour. Let's say that hiring a worker to perform the job costs $14.50 per hour at the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour (including taxes and benefits and whatnot).
I actually run a business, and for me, I'd much rather hire a worker at $14.50 per hour than buy the machine at $15 per hour because while the machine really would only be able to perform the task that it was designed to perform, a human being is much more versatile and can be trained and can grow with my business.
But now we raise minimum wage to $15 per hour, which is really $30 per hour once you get done with taxes and benefits. As a business owner, this tradeoff looks very different to me. Now the employee costs twice what the machine costs. While I'd generally prefer to have an employee over a machine, in this case, I'd have to buy the machine and not hire the worker. I mean, it's twice the cost if I hire someone. I've got a family to feed. Not happening.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
This is an experiment. If Seattle's unemployment rate goes up, you MUST accept the fact that raising the minimum wage kills jobs. If it goes down, then you MUST accept the fact that you are living in some sort of magical fantasyland where economic laws don't apply, and should immediately set about breaking windows and starting nuclear wars with aliens to improve the economy.
Imagine if there were a minimum home price. Say, $75,000. Sounds reasonable, right? I mean, everyone should have a right to be able to sell their home for enough to buy another somewhere. But what about houses that aren't worth that much (so cruel, so judgmental!)? They just sit around, and the owners are literally stuck. Sort of like today's young workers, for whom the job market just keeps going up and up and up, leaving new household formation at all time lows. Instead of being able to get a job, they have to go to college and get a degree along with a lifetime of debt slavery, and often wind up with jobs that don't require degrees, and certainly don't pay enough to service the debt.
Americans NEVER seem to look at other countries. No matter what you're discussing, health care, gun laws, wages, whatever, they always speculate wildly about what might happen if. Never mind that much of the rest of the world has already tried it and found it works pretty well.
Absolute fail. You logic assumes that EVERYONE at Walmart is making minimum wage.
and those countries with higher minimum wages also tend to have better social services, and higher taxes to accommodate the increase in unemployment. You forget that we in America invented the "i've got mine, fuck you" mindset.
Not true. We seem to look at third-world shitholes and say "hey, at least we're not a third-world shithole, we've got $THING better than they do". In my experience, at least, we don't generally compare ourselves to other first-world countries and especially not western and northern Europe, probably because we privately admit to ourselves that (unemployment aside) we're not doing as well as they are generally.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
That's basic economics. The wage goes up, but prices only have to go up a tiny fraction due to the distributed source of paying for that wage. It's not this 1 for 1 that people think, it never has been and it never will be. That argument is brought out every single time min wage is increased, and it gets proven wrong every single time.
The math has been done to prove in order to raise McDonalds workers wage to 15/hour, the price of a big mac would only need to go up by 43 cents. Thats all.
So you're going to give the cashier a 50% raise and give nothing to their manager?
Stop moving the goalposts. The post I was responding to said that a 50% increase in minimum wage equates to a 50% increase in labor expense. It does not. As a separate issue, you could give a raise to their manager (but not necessarily 50%). And it doesn't need to go all the way up the chain to the execs!
Maybe you just don't understand what the word 'average' means.
Maybe you don't understand that increasing minimum wage by 50% is not equivalent to increasing the average wage by 50%.
Don't be daft. Of course Walmart would increase prices if the minimum wage were increased just like everyone else. If they had to increase wages 50% UNILATERALLY they would instantly be unprofitable because they couldn't raise prices in that instance.
One minute you claim that a 50% wage hike would cause Walmart to be unprofitable, and the next you claim that they would increase prices. You can't have it both ways, and that's all I was trying to say. Also, any wage increases would be unilateral; Walmart's workforce is not unionized, and therefore all decisions regarding wages are made unilaterally since there is no second party to wage negotiations.
Regarding payroll taxes, you're oversimplifying. Many payroll taxes are regressive, with a cap on taxable income. Fringe benefits that you mention are also regressive (for example, employer's health insurance contributions for employees is not linearly proportional to wage, and doubling wages doesn't double insurance costs). Consequently, a 50% hike in wages does not result in a 50% hike in overhead costs. Additionally, depending on how you're cooking your books, you did already mention a $27.5B hike in labor costs. If the initial $55B in labor costs included this overhead, then the $27.5B increase also includes the 50% increase in overhead (despite the real increase in overhead necessarily being less than 50%).
7.5% isn't a bound of any kind - merely an illustrative simplistic example that the real number is a LOT higher than 1.1%.
But that's my point. 7.5% isn't a "LOT" higher. It's a lot less than the 50% growth in wages that we're talking about. Most businesses would jump at the chance to increase their costs by 7.5% while at the same time increasing their revenues by 50%, and I think we'd all agree that this is a good deal. Why does this not hold true when discussing wage hikes?
It's much more complicated than you are making it out to be. By raising the minimum wage you are increasing costs for all domestic manufacturers (and there are LOTS). This effectively is a subsidy to overseas (read China) manufacturers who do not have wage supports at the expense of domestic ones who do. Manufacturers in the US would have to either lose business or in many cases simply shut down. So to prop up Walmart associates wages you are doing so at the expense of US manufacturing workers. Since they shop at Walmart too that is revenue that Walmart isn't going to get AND you are costing people their entire paycheck to raise someone else's by 50%. Did you think the money would come with no consequence?
1) Tarriffs
2) The domestic service/retail industry dwarfs the domestic manufacturing industry. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
3) The money comes with consequences, and on the whole, it's still a positive.
There's no evidence to support your remaining claims regarding inflation, unemployment, supply chain effects, etc. However, I do agree that it's NOT simply that everyone is magically better off with no downside anywhere. Some people would undoubtedly be worse off, but overall, it would be a benefit to society.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.